Wrong Directions

A few questions to consider, on your own in writing, or in discussion with others:
Have you ever given the wrong directions? Have you ever been misdirected, by a teacher or other trusted person?

Now write some lists:

• 5 things you’ve learned about poetry that you’ve had to unlearn
• 5 bad pieces of advice you’ve been given
• 5 lies you have told, to yourself or others

Now think of 2-3 places you know well and could navigate without a map. Draw and label an incorrect or inaccurate map of each place.

Read Rick Barot’s “The Wooden Overcoat,” a poem that, at its start, purports to be about making a distinction of poetic terminology. What does it end up about? What does the poet decide about the distinction he initially made? What is the poet trying to say about why and how we write poetry?

Read Jamaal May’s “There Are Birds Here.” In this poem, the poet again and again revises his figurative language, in order to recuperate the story of a place from prejudice and cliché. What is the poet trying to say about what metaphor and simile have the power to do, or what they might fail to do?

Read W.S. Merwin’s “Some Last Questions,” a poem that purports to ask and answer questions. What does it really do? What might the poem be trying to say about the authority of a poem?

Read John Berryman’s “Dream Song 14.” This poem’s speaker claims life is boring at the poem’s start. What does he go on to say that might contradict that?

Now write a poem that begins with a misdirection—one from the lists you brainstormed or otherwise—that undoes itself or reveals its folly by the poem’s end. Or, write the story of the places you created when you drew incorrect maps.